§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising. In particular, the present invention concerns generating information for the targeted serving of ads.
§1.2 Related Art
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Advertisers have developed several strategies in an attempt to maximize the value of such advertising. In one strategy, advertisers use popular presences or means for providing interactive media or services (referred to as “Web sites” in the specification without loss of generality) as conduits to reach a large audience. Using this first approach, an advertiser may place ads on the home page of the New York Times Web site, or the USA Today Web site, for example. In another strategy, an advertiser may attempt to target its ads to narrower niche audiences, thereby increasing the likelihood of a positive response by the audience. For example, an agency promoting tourism in the Costa Rican rainforest might place ads on the ecotourism-travel subdirectory of the Yahoo Web site. An advertiser will normally determine such targeting manually.
Regardless of the strategy, Web site-based ads (also referred to as “Web ads”) are typically presented to their advertising audience in the form of “banner ads”—i.e., a rectangular box that includes graphic components. When a member of the advertising audience (referred to as a “viewer” or “user” in the Specification without loss of generality) selects one of these banner ads by clicking on it, embedded hypertext links typically direct the viewer to the advertiser's Web site. This process, wherein the viewer selects an ad, is commonly referred to as a “click-through” (“Click-through” is intended to cover any user selection.). The ratio of the number of click-throughs to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed) is commonly referred to as the “click-through rate” of the ad.
A “conversion” is said to occur when a user consummates a transaction related to a previously served ad. What constitutes a conversion may vary from case to case and can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, it may be the case that a conversion occurs when a user clicks on an ad, is referred to the advertiser's web page, and consummates a purchase there before leaving that web page. Alternatively, a conversion may be defined as a user being shown an ad, and making a purchase on the advertiser's web page within a predetermined time (e.g., seven days). In yet another alternative, a conversion may be defined by an advertiser to be any measurable/observable user action such as, for example, downloading a white paper, navigating to at least a given depth of a Website, viewing at least a certain number of Web pages, spending at least a predetermined amount of time on a Website or Web page, etc. Often, if user actions don't indicate a consummated purchase, they may indicate a sales lead, although user actions constituting a conversion are not limited to this. Indeed, many other definitions of what constitutes a conversion are possible. The ratio of the number of conversions to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed) is commonly referred to as the conversion rate. If a conversion is defined to be able to occur within a predetermined time since the serving of an ad, one possible definition of the conversion rate might only consider ads that have been served more than the predetermined time in the past.
Despite the initial promise of Web site-based advertisement, there remain several problems with existing approaches. Although advertisers are able to reach a large audience, they are frequently dissatisfied with the return on their advertisement investment.
Similarly, the hosts of Web sites on which the ads are presented (referred to as “Web site hosts” or “ad consumers”) have the challenge of maximizing ad revenue without impairing their users' experience. Some Web site hosts have chosen to place advertising revenues over the interests of users. One such Web site is “Overture.com”, which hosts a so-called “search engine” service returning advertisements masquerading as “search results” in response to user queries. The Overture.com web site permits advertisers to pay to position an ad for their Web site (or a target Web site) higher up on the list of purported search results. If such schemes where the advertiser only pays if a user clicks on the ad (i.e., cost-per-click) are implemented, the advertiser lacks incentive to target their ads effectively, since a poorly targeted ad will not be clicked and therefore will not require payment. Consequently, high cost-per-click ads show up near or at the top, but do not necessarily translate into real revenue for the ad publisher because viewers don't click on them. Furthermore, ads that viewers would click on are further down the list, or not on the list at all, and so relevancy of ads is compromised.
Search engines, such as Google for example, have enabled advertisers to target their ads so that they will be rendered with a search results page and so that they will be relevant, presumably, to the query that prompted the search results page. Other targeted advertising systems may target ads based on e-mail information (See, e.g., the systems described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/452,830 (incorporated herein by reference), entitled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS USING INFORMATION ASSOCIATED WITH E-MAIL”, filed on Jun. 2, 2003 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Bucheit); or, more generally, based on content (See, e.g., U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/375,900 (incorporated herein by reference), entitled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT”, filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Bucheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal, and Narayanan Shivakumar). Such advertising systems would like to present advertisements that are relevant to user requested information.
Although targeted advertising systems such as those introduced above represent a great advance in online advertising, to participate in online advertising, advertisers typically must perform many steps, some of which can be time consuming and expensive. For example, in the context of targeted online advertising, an advertiser must typically (1) select a desired action (typically having user's browser navigate to a particular destination Website or Web page (commonly referred to as a “landing page”)) in response to a user selecting their ad, (2) select or target appropriate Web pages (or some other documents) to advertise on (i.e., target the serving of their ad) and (3) create ad copy (also referred to as a “creative”) that will be used to entice users to select their ad.
Selecting a landing page is typically done manually or in a semi-automated fashion. In the manual case, an advertiser with a small or medium sized Website might have only a handful of Web pages related to the actual sale of products. In this case, the advertiser may manually specify appropriate ones of such Web pages. In the semi-automated case, an advertiser may have a medium to large Website which may include “landing pages” that were generated using a database. Typically one such Web page is generated for each product sold. Even in this semi-automated case, the generation of “landing pages” requires a large amount of work on behalf of the advertiser.
Selecting or targeting documents to advertise on can also be a difficult and laborious process. For example, an advertiser may select Web pages that one of its advertisements is to be shown on (these documents are called “content documents”) manually. Thus, for example, an advertiser might decide to advertise on the Web page yahoo.com (Yahoo's home page). Given the number of content documents available, such manual selection often misses many opportunities, often including the most appropriate content documents for serving its ads with. As another example, an advertiser may choose a set of keywords which define a set of search engine “search results pages” on which one of its advertisements might be applicable (these documents are referred to as “search results documents”). Typically, the set of chosen keywords defines a set of words which have to occur in a query on a search engine for the ad to even be eligible for inclusion on the search results page.
Selecting a creative to communicate the purchasing opportunity to a customer can also be time consuming and expensive. For example, copy writers or advertising agents are often employed to come up with catchy creatives. However, hiring and managing copy writers and advertising agents is typically very expensive, and is therefore beyond the means of many small to medium size companies.
In view of the foregoing, it would be useful to help an advertiser to (1) select a desired action (typically having user's browser navigate to a particular Website or Web page (commonly referred to as a “landing page”)) in response to a user selecting their ad, (2) select or target one or more appropriate Web pages (or “documents”) to advertise on, and/or (3) create ad copy (also referred to as a “creative”) that will be used to entice users to select their ad.